On Gwe, 2004-12-10 at 14:24, James Henstridge wrote:
> On 10/12/04 14:57, Damon Chaplin wrote:
> Such information exists for Windows developers too, yet there is a fair
> number of applications out there that ignore the correct way of handling
> things. It isn't clear to me that such a document would help Gnome when
> it didn't for Windows.
Right now all software is broken in non English locales. If we document
it properly only some software will remain broken and since most of this
is free software translators and their allies will be able to fix them
unlike in Windows.
Part of it is also about making the API not the documents right.
Programmers don't read documentation but they are intrinisically lazy so
given a choice between gnome_open_on_desktop("frob.me", "r") and a
complex API will use the former and regularly "cheat" and forget to do
it right without the simple API.
It has to be easy to do the right thing (and preferably hard to screw
up).